Titans of Artisanal Food Expand in Crowded New York City Arena

By the lunch rush on Monday, the sun had maneuvered around the Midtown towers, warming a bustling three-block slice of Broadway, from 41st Street to 39th. In the pedestrian plaza, Roberta’s mobile wood-burning pizza oven was firing its sopressata-topped pies, for which the line seemed to stretch back to the restaurant’s Brooklyn home.

Over at Red Hook Lobster Pound, a man in a spiffy suit asked for the source — down to the exact harbor — of the lobsters in the $16 rolls. Colleagues sitting at tables savoring General Tso mushroom rice bowls and pastrami dumplings were accosted by food voyeurs, and also panhandlers. Construction workers viewed the scene with amusement while a hawker for a hamburger booth shouted in a looping soundtrack: “Antibiotic-free! Hormone-free!”

This was no carnival. This was the garment district food market, only the latest to hit the streets of New York, and the newest creation from UrbanSpace, a British import that operates holiday markets in Manhattan as well as a growing number of food-only markets in an increasingly crowded culinary landscape.

From Eataly to the Plaza Food Hall, Hester Street Fair to Gotham West Market, Hudson Eats in Battery Park City and over to Smorgasburg in Brooklyn, chef-entrepreneurs have taken their craft from kitchen to booth. They are operating in outdoor stalls, repurposed shipping containers or semi-permanent halls — with an eye, perhaps, toward real estate of their own. Smorgasburg, arguably, has been the scene’s leading tastemaker.

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At UrbanSpace’s garment district food market, Roberta’s Pizza.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

Out of public view, an even longer game is playing out. UrbanSpace and Smorgasburg have become competitors in the sacred space where artisanal meets fast casual. Smorgasburg has the cachet; UrbanSpace has the location.

“To me, it’s a very different game than what they’re doing,” Julie Feltman, 27, UrbanSpace’s outdoor market director, said on Monday. “This is Midtown Manhattan. We land here with not a lot of fanfare beforehand and we already have people selling out at lunch.”

Until now, the two companies mostly have had their own turf — UrbanSpace on Broadway, Smorgasburg in Brooklyn. Their approach differs, too. UrbanSpace operates markets with a limited run and about 30 vendors, in places where tourists flock and New Yorkers work. Smorgasburg, the largest public market in the city, built its brand from a borough, if not the other way around. It was spawned from the Brooklyn Flea, which started mostly with small retail vendors.

“When I’m in Brooklyn, it’s a neighborhood, it’s a cultural experience, it’s an international experience,” said Susan Povich, the owner of Red Hook Lobster Pound, one of the original food vendors at Brooklyn Flea, who was at the garment district market on Monday. “Here, I’m basically trying to sell sandwiches to people on the street, to the guy that works in that building. I look at this as more of an outdoor food court.”

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At UrbanSpace’s garment district food market, the poffertjes booth.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

Smorgasburg has crossed the East River before, with select vendors selling at Whole Foods on Houston Street, and as concessionaires for Central Park SummerStage concerts since 2010. On Friday evening, Smorgasburg planned to host a pop-up market/happy hour with 30 vendors at the SummerStage site, hoping to make it a weekly venture next summer.

“I don’t know that we view them as competition — I view them as a corollary,” Eric Demby, co-founder of Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg, said of UrbanSpace. “I’ll be perfectly honest with you, there was a time when Smorgasburg was less established when we were more concerned with their comings and goings. Now we are both quite successful. We are both riding the same wave.”

In Crown Heights last month, Smorgasburg opened Berg’n, a 9,000-square-foot beer hall and food court with four vendors from the market. The beer hall is connected to a former Studebaker service center developed into an office building in part by Jonathan Butler, the Brooklyn Flea’s co-founder. On Tuesday, the company signed a short-term lease for the vacant ground floor to be the winter home of Smorgasburg and Brooklyn Flea.

UrbanSpace is preparing its first indoor operation, and it’s a potential blockbuster: a 10,000-square-foot market, with space for 25 vendors, in the ground-floor walkway of the Helmsley Building, near Grand Central. Roberta’s, an UrbanSpace staple, could be expanding there. Each of the vendors will have a stall with its own kitchen and range hoods, but they will share table space.

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Mad. Sq. EatsCreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

The market’s name will include UrbanSpace — for the first time. Why? “Because we’ve been doing this for 25 years and no one knows about our company,” said Eldon Scott, president of UrbanSpace.

Mr. Scott, a 52-year-old Boston native and Yale graduate, got his start overseas. After earning a master’s from the London School of Economics, he joined Eric Reynolds, the founder of UrbanSpace Management, a company that had been working on urban renewal projects since the 1970s. Mr. Scott created several sites for UrbanSpace in London, including the first organic farmers’ market there in 1992, before opening the New York office in 1994.

He started with the Grand Central Terminal holiday markets, moved on to the Union Square holiday markets in 2003 and added Columbus Circle in 2004. There were food vendors among the retail, but only as an afterthought. “Around 2008, we started to notice there were better chefs and concepts that were coming to us,” he said.

That year, he started Mad. Sq. Eats in the triangular slip of Worth Square, adjacent to the park. That year was also when the Brooklyn Flea was launched in the Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School yard, in Fort Greene — no thanks to Mr. Scott.

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UrbanSpace’s president, Eldon Scott, with the company’s Julie Feltman.CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

Mr. Butler, who had been a Merrill Lynch vice president before leaving in 2007 to start the Brownstoner real estate website, had come to Mr. Scott for advice, directed by a mutual friend in finance.

“Actually, to give him credit, I was like, ‘A market in a schoolyard?’ ” Mr. Scott said, laughing as he recalled the exchange. “So, I didn’t see it. I also didn’t live in Brooklyn, so I didn’t see that energy bubbling.”

Mr. Scott’s only venture in Brooklyn had been DeKalb Market, with vendors operating out of converted shipping containers. The quirky market drew design acclaim but not consistent pedestrian traffic; after a two-year run, it shut in 2012 to make way for condominium construction.

Mr. Scott, whose full-time staff now numbers seven, focused on pop-up markets, like Broadway Bites, in Greeley Square off 33rd Street, which opens again next month.

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Berg’n is their competitor’s new beer hall.CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

Mr. Scott served no fewer than three metaphors for putting together a reinvented food court, comparing it to designing a Facebook page, arranging guests at a dinner party and creating an artificial reef.

“You throw down a bunch of tires and cinder blocks,” he said. “The stuff isn’t beautiful; the beauty is the color of the fish.”

UrbanSpace beat out five other companies in the public request process to run the new market, negotiating with the Garment District Alliance to pay a lump sum of $70,000. The company supplies the booths and the electricity, which vendors pay for.

Black Iron Burger has brick-pattern wallpaper in its garment district stall, matching its restaurant on West 38th Street. Christie MacKinnon, 36, the owner of Kicky’s Kitchen, which makes alcohol-infused cake bites (“caketails”), uses the same wooden bar she took to college at Harvard, and the disco ball from her sister’s Sweet 16. Frittering Away, a lemonade company that began at Smorgasburg as a fritter stand, has a white picket fence.

The market will run through Oct. 17 and then return in the spring. In November and December, UrbanSpace will run a holiday market in more or less the same space.

Opening day in the garment district had hiccups like any new production. Ms. MacKinnon’s sign had not yet come in; other vendors had yet to hang theirs. Edward Huang, the founder of Zai Lai’s organic Chinese food, had graduated from one-day pop-ups only to split his pants, catch a cold and have a new worker be a no-show on Day 1.

Lines were long for the paella, pizzas and quinoa arepas, as vendors and customers figured out the somewhat precious pricing and the market’s rhythm.

“Took a little longer than expected,” one diner said. His friend responded from his food coma: “That’s O.K., we’re outside the office.”